The transformation of sour fruit into a delicious drink has symbolized the struggle that is existence at least since a 1915 obituary for the dwarf actor Marshall P. Wilder read, “He picked up the lemons that Fate had sent him and started a lemon-ade stand.” The subsequent popularity of the lemons → lemonade metaphor might owe to the fact that its underlying narrative is, more or less, the only story anyone ever wants to tell. What is the American Dream if not a story of sweetening one’s condition? What about the Christian vision of salvation? What about Hamilton?

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The narrative dominates pop music so much that Sia, the singer and songwriter charged with demystifying the present-day hits machine, once jargonized it as “victim to victory.” Pop stars peddle this idea by their very existence—no one is born selling platinum albums—but also, almost inevitably, through their songs: When little else is relatable about a millionaire celebrity, they can still scour their life for evidence of struggle. Successful efforts to do so usually mean making the trope feel new using seemingly authentic details or stylistic innovation or both. In the biggest releases of the season, both Beyoncé and Drake have once again reengaged with culture’s favorite fairytale—Beyoncé to imbue it with more meaning, and Drake to make it smaller.

Beyoncé’s name has been synonymous with perfectionism and power for a long time now. But the most recent phase of her career has sought to peel back the superhuman veneer while still maintaining an extreme degree of control over her image. One of the achievements of her 2013 self-titled album was reminding audiences that her current reign came about only through a long slog of hard work: The fierceness barrage of “Flawless” was bookended by a clip of her on Star Search in 1993, where the host mispronounced her name and then announced her group had lost to a rock band.

Her new album and film, Lemonade, is not about rising to greatness; it’s about being great and still having to struggle. Part of the genius of it is in putting specific and interesting meaning back into the “lemons into lemonade” phrase, otherwise washed of its power by overuse. The lemons here are the betrayal (we are led to think) of Beyoncé’s husband Jay Z. They are also the historic burdens black women have faced. Highlighting these obstacles communicates that Beyoncé is not above the rest of humankind—she is right in the middle of it, facing personal problems like we all do, yoked to history and society like we all are.

Lemonade goes further still in disassembling cliché and using each piece of it for effect. Lemonade is associated with the American South, where much of the visual album is set. Turning lemons into lemonade entails exactly the kind of labor—traditionally feminine, communal-minded, nourishing—that Beyoncé seeks to elevate. We don’t just hear Jay Z’s grandma Hattie say she turned lemons into lemonade; we get her actual recipe (“one pint of water, add a half pound of sugar, the juice of eight lemons, the zest of half lemon ...”).

Perhaps most impressively from an artistic perspective, Beyoncé deepens the victim-to-victory narrative by avoiding pat moments of uplift. Some people might argue that the visual album’s eventual arrival at the images of cute, diverse couples seems Hallmark-y. But sit with the album and you find the real story Beyoncé tells is of a measured victory, won on compromised terms, with much work left to be done. That’s why the climax of reconciliation, “All Night,” is sung in future-tense: It’s about the expectation of rekindled passion, not yet the existence of it. That’s why you have a queasy interstitial like “Forward,” during which she shows the mothers of black men killed by police. Triumph does not erase loss. Personal success only means so much in a society that’s failing in so many ways.

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The controlling metaphor of Drake’s new album, Views, is the cycle of seasons in Toronto from winter to summer to winter again. This is a perfect Drake concept on so many levels—the cold edges, the hometown pride, the overlap of banal and specific—but the most important one may be the fact that it communicates stasis. Winter is always coming; a year from now, most things will be the same. One of the threads through the album is an odd and arguably pathological belief in the permanent present when it comes to romance: “If I ever loved ya, I’ll always love ya that’s how I was raised”; “I group DM my exes / I tell ‘em they belong to me, that goes on for forever.”

Yet Drake’s entire career has been a variant on the classic hip-hop storyline about transformation of difficult circumstances. A Canadian, half-Jewish black kid who acted in the TV show Degrassi, Drake’s arc has been less about dealing with material adversity—though he’s said his upbringing was more hardscrabble than many assumed—than it has been about beating perceptions held against him by culture and hip-hop. “Started From the Bottom” is an anthem whose sentiment, made plain by its title, can fit lots of people. But in songs where Drake references, say, his protective mother, or the guff he gets for singing sensitively, or the specific places he grew up in, his story takes on a very particular shape.

Drake calls himself the “6 God” and placed himself on the top of the CN Tower for his Views cover to show that he’s ascended to overlord status. But he keeps flashing back to the same battles he’s waged before: “They think I had the silver spoon but they’ll get it soon,” he raps on Views’s title track, with “they” referring to unnamed skeptics of his life story. On another song, “Weston Road Flows,” he reminisces about being too poor to buy pizza. A very specific kind of nostalgia pervades the album, via references to Toronto and washed-out samples of ’90s hip hop and R&B. He doesn’t want anyone to forget where he’s come from.

But he also doesn’t want anyone to think he’s comfortable now. In the context of Views’s lyrics, the image of him on the top of the tower mostly illustrates that he can’t climb much higher but could very easily tumble quite far. His great theme is insecurity—not the kind that comes from self-doubt, really, but rather the kind that comes from being let down by other people. Both lovers and friends turn out to be disloyal; the album opens with a slowly unfurling orchestral piece about the fact that none of his exes have stayed in touch with him, and the Beats 1 interview he gave on Views’s release night was defined by tension over how former allies like The Weeknd aren’t in his camp anymore.

For Drake, the most interesting thing about success is that it can be lost.

Underlying Drake’s embattled mentality is deathly anxiety that everything he’s achieved could crumble at any moment. “I got it right now so I’m everybody’s friend / If I ever lose I bet we never speak again,” he raps on “9,” a strobe-lit anthem about giving Toronto a new area-code-related nickname for the second time in his career. “Y’all showed me that nothing’s guaranteed,” he says over the baroque trunk-rattling of “Pop Style” in a verse he swapped in for one Kanye West performed in an earlier version of the song (a choice that contributes to the sense that Drake is cultivating isolation). For Drake, the most interesting thing about success is that it can be lost.

He’s able to maintain his spot this time out less because of his attitude or storytelling skills than his flair for cutting-edge genre mashups. Dancehall is his current muse, used to undeniably wonderful effect Views’s slew of summertime jams like the swaying and seductive “Controlla” and the current hit “One Dance.” Earlier on the album, the sputtering synthpop of “Feel No Ways” hosts a melody as yearning and sinuous as Drake’s previous lounge-crooner hits “Hotline Bling” and “Hold On, We’re Going Home.” Elsewhere, the producer Noah “40” Shebib’s intricately strange and dour arrangements pair with Drake’s ranting to create an immersive fog of paranoia and arrogance—exactly what you come to a Drake album for.

Still, an hour and a half is a long time for anyone to spend with someone who seems militantly against the concept of personal growth. He only ever answers pettiness with pettiness, often disproportionately, as on the bounce-music tragicomedy of “Child’s Play,” where he scolds a girl for acting wrong at the Cheesecake Factory and threatens, “Don’t make me give you back to the hood.” There’s a lethargic, shiveringly beautiful ballad called “Redemption,” where the point is that neither he nor any of his exes shall be redeemed. The depression you might feel listening to this stuff is less the emotional kind than the existential kind: Views is life as a cul de sac.

Drake, like so many people, perhaps should take a cue from Beyoncé. Both Views and Lemonade center on the idea that victors can become victims again. But Beyoncé embarks on a journey over the course of her album, moving from thinking of relationships in transactional terms—love and security as payment for being fiercer than anyone else—to something deeper. She invokes family, history, and culture to help her understand her relationship, lessen her loneliness, and to make a call for broad social progress.

It’s almost impossible to imagine Drake pulling the same sort of move. There is no journey on Views, nor is there a notion of common cooperative struggle. The idea that life—romance, professional achievement, pride—should be approached as anything other than a basketball tournament or some other zero-sum affair never occurs to him. He’s climbed the tower, and if you want to get up there you’ll have to knock him off first.

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In the landscape where Mad Max: Fury Road was filmed, a scientist is trying to understand a natural phenomenon that has eluded explanation for decades.

One evening earlier this spring, German naturalist Norbert Jürgens strayed from his expedition in the Namib Desert. He walked away from his campsite beside Leopard Rock, a huge pile of schist slabs stacked like left-over roofing tiles, and into a vast plain ringed with red-burnished hills. He had 20 minutes of light left before sunset, and he intended to use them.

This next part may sound like a reenactment from a nature documentary, but trust me: This is how it went down.

Off by himself, Jürgens dropped down to his knees. He sank his well-tanned arms in the sand up to the elbows. As he rooted around, he told me later, he had a revelation.

At the time, I was watching from the top of Leopard Rock, which offered a bird’s-eye view of both Jürgens and his expedition’s quarry. Across the plain, seemingly stamped into its dry, stubbly grass, were circles of bare ground, each about the size of an aboveground pool. Jürgens, a professor at the University of Hamburg, was digging—and pondering—in one of these bare patches.

The class divide is already toxic, and is fast becoming unbridgeable. You’re probably part of the problem.

1. The Aristocracy Is Dead …

For about a week every year in my childhood, I was a member of one of America’s fading aristocracies. Sometimes around Christmas, more often on the Fourth of July, my family would take up residence at one of my grandparents’ country clubs in Chicago, Palm Beach, or Asheville, North Carolina. The breakfast buffets were magnificent, and Grandfather was a jovial host, always ready with a familiar story, rarely missing an opportunity for gentle instruction on proper club etiquette. At the age of 11 or 12, I gathered from him, between his puffs of cigar smoke, that we owed our weeks of plenty to Great-Grandfather, Colonel Robert W. Stewart, a Rough Rider with Teddy Roosevelt who made his fortune as the chairman of Standard Oil of Indiana in the 1920s. I was also given to understand that, for reasons traceable to some ancient and incomprehensible dispute, the Rockefellers were the mortal enemies of our clan.

The 9-year-old has built a huge following with profane Instagram posts, but the bravado of “the youngest flexer of the century” masks a sadder tale about fame and exploitation.

In mid-February, a mysterious 9-year-old by the name of Lil Tay began blowing up on Instagram.

“This is a message to all y’all broke-ass haters, y’all ain't doing it like Lil Tay,” she shouts as she hops into a red Mercedes, hands full of wads of cash. “This is why all y’all fucking haters hate me, bitch. This shit cost me $200,000. I’m only 9 years old. I don’t got no license, but I still drive this sports car, bitch. Your favorite rapper ain’t even doing it like Lil Tay.”

Referring to herself as “the youngest flexer of the century,” Lil Tay quickly garnered a fan base of millions, including big name YouTubers who saw an opportunity to capitalize on her wild persona. In late January, RiceGum, an extremely influential YouTube personality dedicated an entire roast video to Lil Tay.

The text reflected not only the president’s signature syntax, but also the clash between his desire for credit and his intuition to walk away.

Donald Trump’s approach to North Korea has always been an intensely personal one—the president contended that his sheer force of will and negotiating prowess would win the day, and rather than use intermediaries, he planned for a face-to-face meeting, with himself and Kim Jong Un on either side of a table.

So Trump’s notice on Thursday that he was canceling the June 12 summit in Singapore was fitting. It arrived in the form of a letter that appears to have been written by the president himself. The missive features a Trumpian mix of non sequiturs, braggadocio, insults, flattery, and half-truths. Whether the dramatic letter marks the end of the current process or is simply a negotiating feint, it matches the soap-operatic series of events that preceded it. Either way, it displays the ongoing conflict between Trump’s desire for pageantry and credit and his longstanding dictum that one must be willing to walk away from the negotiating table.

The Americans and the North Koreans were all set for a historic meeting. Then they started talking about Libya.

Of all the countries that might have acted as a spoiler for the summit in Singapore between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un—China, Russia, Japan, the United States and North Korea themselves—the one that doomed it was unexpected. It isn’t even involved in North Korea diplomacy and is locateda long 6,000 miles away from the Korean Peninsula. It’s Libya.

Yet Libya ought to have been top of mind. It’s notoriously difficult to determine what motivates the strategic choices and polices of North Korea’s leaders, but among the factors that has been evident for some time is Kim Jong Un’s fear of ending up like Muammar al-Qaddafi. The Libyan strongman was pulled from a drainage pipe and shot to death by his own people following a U.S.-led military intervention during the Arab Spring in 2011. The North Korean government views its development of nuclear weapons—a pursuit Qaddafi abandoned in the early 2000s, when his nuclear program was far less advanced than North Korea’s, in exchange for the easing of sanctions and other promised benefits—as its most reliable shield against a hostile United States that could very easily inflict a similar fate on Kim. We know this because the North Korean government has repeatedly said as much. “The Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq and the Gaddafi regime in Libya could not escape the fate of destruction after being deprived of their foundations for nuclear development and giving up nuclear programs of their own accord,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency observed in 2016.

A short—and by no means exhaustive—list of the open questions swirling around the president, his campaign, his company, and his family.

President Trump speculated on Tuesday that “if” the FBI placed a spy inside his campaign, that would be one of the greatest scandals in U.S. history. On Wednesday morning on Twitter, the “if” dropped away—and Trump asserted yesterday’s wild surmise as today’s fact. By afternoon, a vast claque of pro-Trump talkers repeated the president’s fantasies and falsehoods in their continuing project to represent Donald Trump as an innocent victim of a malicious conspiracy by the CIA, FBI, and Department of Justice.

The president’s claims are false, but they are not fantasies. They are strategies to fortify the minds of the president’s supporters against the ever-mounting evidence against the president. As Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz show in their new book about impeachment, an agitated and committed minority can suffice to protect a president from facing justice for even the most strongly proven criminality.

In excusing his Arrested Development castmate’s verbal abuse of Jessica Walter, the actor showed how Hollywood has justified bad behavior for generations.

“What we do for a living is not normal,” Jason Bateman said in Wednesday’s New York Times interviewwith the cast of Arrested Development, in an effort to address his co-star Jeffrey Tambor’s admitted verbal abuse of Jessica Walter. “Therefore the process is not normal sometimes, and to expect it to be normal is to not understand what happens on set. Again, not to excuse it.” As Hollywood continues to grapple with widespread revelations of hostile work environments, institutional sexism, and sexual misconduct on and off set, Bateman insisted that he wasn’t trying to explain away an actor’s bad behavior—while displaying, over and over, exactly how his industry does it.

Bateman’s glaring mistake in the interview—for which he has already apologized—is how he rushed to defend Tambor from Walter’s account of Tambor screaming at her on the set of Arrested Development years ago. In doing so, Bateman defaulted to every entrenched cultural script of minimizing fault, downplaying misbehavior, and largely attributing Tambor’s verbal harassment to the unique, circumstantial pressures of acting—a process, he suggested, most onlookers could not hope to understand.

As recently as the 1950s, possessing only middling intelligence was not likely to severely limit your life’s trajectory. IQ wasn’t a big factor in whom you married, where you lived, or what others thought of you. The qualifications for a good job, whether on an assembly line or behind a desk, mostly revolved around integrity, work ethic, and a knack for getting along—bosses didn’t routinely expect college degrees, much less ask to see SAT scores. As one account of the era put it, hiring decisions were “based on a candidate having a critical skill or two and on soft factors such as eagerness, appearance, family background, and physical characteristics.”

The 2010s, in contrast, are a terrible time to not be brainy. Those who consider themselves bright openly mock others for being less so. Even in this age of rampant concern over microaggressions and victimization, we maintain open season on the nonsmart. People who’d swerve off a cliff rather than use a pejorative for race, religion, physical appearance, or disability are all too happy to drop the s‑bomb: Indeed, degrading others for being “stupid” has become nearly automatic in all forms of disagreement.

The bombastic legal adviser to Stormy Daniels is taking cues from the era of O.J. Simpson and Monica Lewinsky.

On cable news these days, there are very few people who have approached President Trump’s ubiquity. In fact, there is only one, and his name is Michael Avenatti. (Stormy who?)

Avenatti is not the first attorney to understand how the publicity game is played. Litigators are often like this: brash, aggressive, and sophisticated media manipulators. But Avenatti is the first celebrity lawyer of the Trump age, and it’s for that reason that he has become ultra-famous: Everything to do with Trump becomes, for good or ill, a star. And so it is with Avenatti, who in the public imagination has become not just “Stormy Daniels’s lawyer Michael Avenatti,” but simply “Michael Avenatti,” and appears to live inside your TV set.

The billionaire’s Twitter tirade was so ill-informed it led to a subtweet from his former head of communications.

Elon Musk’s screed against the media began with a story about Tesla.

“The holier-than-thou hypocrisy of big media companies who lay claim to the truth, but publish only enough to sugarcoat the lie, is why the public no longer respects them,” the entrepreneur tweeted Wednesday, with a link to a post on the website Electrek. The author of that post criticized news coverage of recent Tesla crashes and delays in the production of the Model 3, calling it “obsessive” and saying there’s been a “general increase of misleading clickbait.”

Musk followed that tweet with an hours-long tirade in which he suggested that journalists write negative stories about Tesla to get “max clicks” and “earn advertising dollars or get fired,” blamed the press for the election of President Donald Trump, and polled users on whether he should create a website that rates “the core truth” of articles and tracks “the credibility score” of journalists, which he would consider naming Pravda, like the Soviet state-run, propaganda-ridden news agency.